Otsu thresholding for depth image

Question

I am trying to substract background from depth images acquired with kinect. When I learned what otsu thresholding is I thought that it could with it. Converting the depth im

Answer 1

Otsu is probably good enough for what you are trying to do, but you do need to mask out the zero values before computing the optimal threshold with the Otsu algorithm, otherwise the distribution of intensity values will be skewed lower than what you want.

OpenCV does not provide a mask argument for the cv::threshold function, so you will have to remove those values yourself. I would recommend putting all the non-zero values in a 1 by N matrix, and calling the cv::threshold function with CV_THRESH_OTSU and saving the return value (which is the estimated optimal threshold), and then running the cv::threshold function again on the original image with just the CV_THRESH_BINARY flag and the computed threshold.

Here is one possible implementation:

// move zeros to the back of a temp array
cv::Mat copyImg = origImg;
uint8* ptr = copyImg.datastart;
uint8* ptr_end = copyImg.dataend;
while (ptr < ptr_end) {
  if (*ptr == 0) { // swap if zero
    uint8 tmp = *ptr_end;
    *ptr_end = *ptr;
    *ptr = tmp;
    ptr_end--; // make array smaller
  } else {
    ptr++;
  }
}

// make a new matrix with only valid data
cv::Mat nz = cv::Mat(std::vector<uint8>(copyImg.datastart,ptr_end),true);

// compute optimal Otsu threshold
double thresh = cv::threshold(nz,nz,0,255,CV_THRESH_BINARY | CV_THRESH_OTSU);

// apply threshold
cv::threshold(origImg,origImg,thresh,255,CV_THRESH_BINARY_INV);